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Feeling Nostalgic

I find myself longing for a time when we were not alienated from nature. When houses had front porches with swings andwe sat outside and visited with our neighbors on summer nights when the moon was bright and the air was soft andwarm.

The fragrance of roses and honeysuckle drifted around us andwe shared lemonaide and iced tea. On other occasions weall got together for fried chicken and home made ice cream.

Now we are all locked in our houses with alarm systems andare unaware of the small tragedies and dramas going on around us. We are cautioned to call 911 if an unlicensedhandy man shows his face. I don't like this kind of worldwhere everyone has guns and empathy and compassion are inshort supply. I exercise reasonable caution but I refuseto be a part of this paranoia. I will still help whenI can and over comfort when it is called for.

posted on Jan 13, 2017 11:13 PM ()

Comments:

I hope someday all 50 states will have legal recreational marijuana so we stop getting these dopers who move here for the pot and can't find or keep jobs so they turn to burglary and theft.

I hope so too and if not that at least medical marijuana It is a lot less harmful than the morphine they dose terminal cancer patients withand they can enjoy food since it quells the nausea. It is also helpfulwith other diseases that I am not so up on.

I live outside on of those towns Harriet speaks of. We don't have neighbors close enough to hand out like my parents did in Middle Village, but the positives of this place surely outweigh the negatives. I think it was Ray Kurzweil (computer genius among other things now department head at google) who said in an interview recently that the world is actually a much better place that it was X number of years ago. Crime in this country is actually down in most places, health is up, comfortable living is up, etc. What has actually changed is our immediate access to information (mostly negative). It's certainly true in my world. Although I understand how people who live with locked doors and alarm systems see it differently.

You live close to nature, just as we did when we lived on the farm. Itmakes a difference. I like being free of the burden that having farmanimals imposed. It wasn't fun to deliver a calf at 3 a.m. or to motherone whose real mother rejected it. However, the minute we left Oklahoma City, I always breathed more freely. I will never regret the move because I got to spend my son's last years three blocks from his house. I treasure the time I had with him. The last six weeks of hislife, I stayed with him every day.

I think people carry their own era with them, and their kids often recreate what they loved when they get older. I know my sister's in-laws are like that, kind of old-fashioned in their ways. And I remember a man who always took his dates out to get root beer floats, always at smaller, less modern shops and delis. It became a thing, and his girlfriend liked it.

Going out for root beer floats is a charming idea. When the kids werelittle, we used to walk to the dairy queen for ice cream, accompanied byour siamese scolding us all the way. She herded the children away fromthe street. I miss those sweet days.

I think there may be some small towns that still enjoy these pleasures. Even in the big city, we had small town pleasures. In Chicago on a hot summer night, they opened the fire hydrants and the kids played in the water pouring out. I thought that was Heaven. When I look back, though, I am amazed my mom let me out without a leash. There were perverts around, and derelicts. But I got to recognize the dangerous ones. It was a different kind of education than what got in other places. When I look up the old streets on Google, they're all gone, replaced by ugly concrete updates.

When is progress not really progress? I think we desperately need a sense of community now. I am glad you had the pleasure of being a childwhere you could roam free even though it sounds scary in retrospect.